The Price of Illusion: A Memoir

PROLOGUE

Shrieks of lightning hit the parking lot at Linate Airport, but the flight from Paris had been smooth. I sheltered flat against the plate-glass wall waiting for the car and wondered where this storm had come from. I told myself it wasn’t personal.

The lightning and the rain created traffic jams through Milan that made me late to meet Jonathan Newhouse at Caffè Cova, where I’d been summoned for a talk before the first fashion show. When I arrived, I apologized for the weather.

He sat on a corner banquette beneath a display of porcelain, wearing new glasses that made him look like Rodchenko.

The teacups shone in the glass case behind him; the brass fittings on the mahogany glowed around us in the muted clatter of high heels and waiters’ shoes and teaspoons in china cups and distant bursts of steam nozzles foaming the cappuccinos in the front room. I could feel the tight armholes of my narrow tweed coat, the tug of the pink velvet seat against the crepe of my dress, my platform shoes tight over my toes. My laptop was at my feet in a Gucci case designed for me, next to my Prada bag. New look for the new season, every label in place.

I want you to take a sabbatical, starting today, he said.

On the first day of the European collections? I can’t do that.

Two months, starting now, he said.

Sudden stillness. Ice water in my veins. Guillotine. It’s over. What did I do?

Two thoughts collided and set off a high-pitched whine in my head. No more Vogue. Back to writing. I’ve been on show watching a show for almost seven years, and it’s always the same show. I have nothing to write about.

That’s the end of the salary, the end of the job, why did I think salary before I thought job? How can I take care of Jules now? He’s eaten everything I earn. His apartment, Aneeta who looks after him, Johanna who relieves Aneeta, the studio for Johanna above his apartment, the taxi service, his doctors and his dentists, his meals, his clothes, his everything.

This is between us, don’t talk to anyone, said Jonathan. He pushed a piece of paper at me with one word on it, the name of the place where he wanted me to go. It’s just two months, then you’ll come back. I’m doing this because I’m your friend.

Either you’re my friend, or you’re setting me up, I said. I choose to believe you are my friend.

And having demonstrated to myself how gallant I could be, I decided to proceed to the next item on the typed list my assistant had pasted in my datebook. I’m late for Prada, I said, and before he could stop me I rose and carried my two bags through the steam and crowd of the front room, out into the rain to the waiting car, and on to the Prada show, where I stared at the shoes on the feet of the editors across the runway, and then at the shoes on the feet of the models on the runway, until it hit me that my opinion of the shoes, the dresses, the models, the hair, had entirely ceased to matter. When the show was over, the front-row editors headed backstage to congratulate Miuccia Prada, and I walked very slowly the other way, out onto the street.

Back in my hotel room, I stared at the bed, uncertain what to do next. Beautifully wrapped packages from fashion houses were piled everywhere. I knew the same gifts were in the rooms of every editor in chief in every hotel in Milan: small leather goods with logos, the new handbag, the new fragrance, the new scarf and tassel. Garment bags lay across the sofa, heavy with the fall clothes I’d ordered from Missoni and Jil Sander six months earlier. Clothes for a life I no longer had. He’d said I would come back, but I knew that wasn’t true.

I looked at the name of the place where I was supposed to go. It didn’t occur to me to call my lawyer.

No talking to the press, no talking to anyone, no noise, no movement. He wanted me off the planet, invisible. I couldn’t stay at home; my apartment in Paris was in the center of a knot of fashion streets patrolled by attachés de presse and luxury-goods executives. I’d always thought that in a crisis I’d retreat to a friend’s ranch in central California, but we were in one of our periodic frosts and hadn’t spoken for over a year. There were others in America who’d welcome me; I could hide in their big houses by the sea as fall became winter, but there would be weekends and weekend guests and gossip, and I had been ordered to vanish.

My entire life had been one easy exile after another, but I’d lived in too many places to belong anywhere. I had nowhere to go. I looked again at the slip of paper Jonathan had given me. Cottonwood.

CHAPTER ONE

For expatriates there is no firm ground. We’d arrived in Paris from Los Angeles in May; by Christmas we were in a grand hotel in Hamburg across from a white lake full of seagulls. A Santa Claus stocking with a big red 1951 on it went up on the mantelpiece. I was four, too young to know that we were at the end of 1952. My two dolls and my hand puppet disappeared the day the stocking went up. I wondered if they’d been stolen by the waiter who brought up my dinner, or had decided they didn’t like me and made a break for it. On Christmas day I tore open silver-glitter packages with red ribbons to find, nestled in layers of tissue paper, my own two dolls and my hand puppet. My friends—loyal in the end, and a promise that whatever was lost would always return.

Train stations, waiting rooms and foggy buffets, and then sunshine.

The villa above Cannes was called Coup de Vent, gust of wind. It had a Lucite grand piano in the salon, and flypapers in the kitchen. The view was splendid, the Mediterranean framed by fat fig trees on the dining terrace. When the aircraft carrier Coral Sea pulled into Cannes, my parents and grandparents were invited on board and photographed, composed and glowing, surrounded by dials and valves, the captain in his white uniform clearly smitten with my mother, whose Balenciaga stole set off the extreme décolleté of her gala dress.

My father was Jules. My mother was Joyce. Her parents were Morey and Esta, known to me as Poppy and Nana. They were short, but grand. Morey was dapper in his silver ties, pearl tiepin, ostrich gloves, and, until he realized that they dated him, white spats buttoned over his shoes. When he wasn’t at the casino or the racetrack, he did deals; some worked out, some didn’t. He moved stuff around. When the stuff was frozen, like postwar German marks, he moved himself around.

Esta wore dresses as stiff as boxes, diamond pins along the upper slope of her bosom. She bandaged the tops of her feet every day to hide a condition that split and mottled the skin. The star sapphire on her finger was turning milky from soapy water, but the sapphires on her bracelets stayed a fine dark blue. She hid her jewels at night, mostly from Morey’s gambling emergencies, and mainly in shoe bags. Esta rolled her eyes when my father spoke, and when he drove us along the Grande Corniche in the convertible, she whimpered from the backseat and shrieked at each glimpse of the precipice below.

Morey sent Jules on trips around the Continent to chase schemes that never fully worked out, though they produced enough money to pay the rents on the big houses, to pay the staff, to buy the cars. So did the gambling at Longchamp, the Paris racetrack, and at the Cannes casinos. They went to the casino every night to play with money, first to the winter casino by Golfe-Juan, later to the summer casino down by the port. My mother played Poppy’s numbers at roulette, "Finale 8"—8, 18, 28. They went to galas that ended with fireworks. Some nights I was woken by lightning, some nights by fireworks.

My mother wore espadrilles and striped dresses cut too low. I preferred her in the striped sailor sweater that covered her completely. She had a flash of white in her short black hair and didn’t wear panties.

The smitten captain moved all 45,000 metric tons of the Coral Sea to a spot where it appeared to be perfectly centered between the two fig trees on our patio. He came up to toast his feat, but no sooner had he arrived than the aircraft carrier began to drift toward the Carlton Beach. He was hastily fetched by naval police on motorbikes, relieved of his command, and sent back to Maryland, but without disgrace. He ended his life as an admiral.

My mother played This Little Piggy with me, and paid special attention to the little double toe halfway up the outside of my right foot. You were born with an eleventh toe, and they took part of it off when you were born, she explained. When you’re older, we’ll have the rest of it fixed.

She helped me chase lizards and track snails, went at flies with a swatter, and bought a net to catch butterflies.

In the fall, when the swimming pool was drained, she took me by the hand down the steps into the empty rectangle. The beige sludge under our feet was so thick at the deep end that we had to turn back; we stopped halfway to watch a large green grasshopper on the silty wall.

I think it’s stuck, said my mother, and brought the butterfly net down to keep it still. Then my nanny called me to bath time, and I left my mother holding the net over the grasshopper in the empty pool.

The next day, it was as if another woman had taken her place, as beautiful as she was, with the same white flash in her short black hair, the same eyes, the same cigarettes, the same striped sailor sweater, the same laugh—but never the same smile again. This woman didn’t love me at all, she only pretended. My real mother was the prisoner of an empty pool full of silt. Much later, I’d have a vision of her in the empty pool, standing bare-legged, pelted by rain and wind, shivering in her cotton shirt, alone and hungry and unseen, holding the butterfly net over the grasshopper.

After Cannes, we moved to a pink marble palace atop ceremonial steps behind a fountain in a miniature French garden in a suburb full of prodigiously ugly fretted houses forty minutes from Paris. Le Palais Rose was a 1900 copy of the Grand Trianon at Versailles, but smaller. Two eccentric, fevered aesthetes had owned it, first Robert, comte de Montesquiou, then Luisa, Marchesa Casati. One day they’d be the subjects of illustrated coffee-table books, but in the early 1950s they were remembered only as capricious and unpleasant dead aristocrats.

The Palais Rose was a fantasy about France paid for by my mother’s parents, who occupied the state apartment on the main floor. The comte de Montesquiou and the marchesa Casati, both decadent loners, had never shared the Palais Rose with anyone but servants. My parents and I slept in dark rooms on the lower floor. Our windows gave onto the back garden, where an open drain sometimes released a smell that made Joyce stop and exclaim, Clams!

She was determined that everything in France would be wonderful, even bad smells. She loved clams, oysters, and mussels. I did not.

The furnace didn’t always work, the dirt-encrusted stove had to be replaced, but the Palais Rose was huge and splendid and gorgeous and rare. There were mysterious back stairs from the master bathroom to the chauffeur’s quarters, where there was a chauffeur, a chauffeur’s wife who cooked, and their skinny daughter, whom the chauffeur regularly beat with a short-handled leather martinet.

There was a golden harp missing a few strings in the Grand Salon, and inlaid into the floor was a white marble sun that lit up from underneath when you clicked a brass switch in the wall. There was a winter garden where plants went to die, and many smaller salons filled with dainty chairs and unwelcoming little sofas covered with the kind of petit point embroidery that you could find in the perfume shops along the Rue de Rivoli, where my grandmother shopped for the things—evening bags, satin gloves, useless fans, and precious compacts—that her friends brought home from Paris, to reassure herself, once or twice a week, that she actually lived there. Not Massachusetts, not Chicago, not New York. Paree, she’d say, ooh la la.

The European toilet paper came in hard brown sheets; my father used his Army reserve status to buy Kleenex at the store on the American army base, and each tissue had many uses. Joyce and Esta removed their makeup with Pond’s Cold Cream and Kleenex; each sheet was then folded over to conceal the smears of lipstick and mascara, and set in neat piles by the toilet. The smell of Pond’s was lodged in my nose as the smell of caca; when Nana jabbed raw beef at me in her Pond’s fingers with little cries of Steak tartare! I gagged.

At the Palais Rose, when he was home, my father became my mother. He made me breakfast before he took me to school, and at night he ran his thumbs along my eyebrows to soothe me to sleep. His healing hands were spontaneously drawn to knots in backs, cricks in necks; he’d hold his hand flat against an aching back and the hurt would go away. His touch reassured me; I didn’t know he wasn’t working.

Before school, we’d share a petit pain au chocolat from the pâtisserie at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where, at Christmastime, and only at Christmastime, they had pyramids of chocolate-covered cherries in brandy called griottes, and he’d let me eat one of those as well, even before school. They were our favorites.

Say it in French, he’d command. I’d say it in French. Griottes.

We’d moved to France before I’d mastered English, so French was my first full language. The adults talked baby talk to me, so my English was vague. I was a confident translator before I turned five, adept at asking for more ice, fresher bread, the meat cooked à point, saignant, or bien cuit. I had to scold the waiter if the wine was corked, "Bouchonné." Nana always wanted saccharine, which didn’t translate.

French was more than a party trick. The language set Frenchness inside me as a hunger for rules and form that went unmet in the margins of my family’s fantasy of a beautiful French life. I envied the strict households that my school friends described, I wanted rules to rebel against, but the most Joyce and Nana ever said was speak softly in public, never grab, and never, ever, wear an ankle bracelet.

The clues I gleaned from my family were about how things looked and where they came from and how old they were and whether they went together: chairs, drapes—no, curtains—tables, luggage, radios, cameras, watches, cars, cigars; and dresses, shoes, stoles, shawls, bags, minaudières, compacts, pins, bracelets, rings. In a restaurant, Nana would say, How pretty that ashtray is, two seconds before she popped it into her handbag, where it landed against her enamel compact with a giveaway thunk. She liked collecting pieces of Paris.

In the center of the kitchen stood a single thick pole, shiny black, that belonged in a garage, and so irritated Nana that she decided to beautify it. She’d read about marbleizing, so she bought a small can of yellow house paint with two thin brushes, and settled groaning onto a stool to get to work. She gave me one of the brushes, showed me how to drag a yellow squiggle a few centimeters before you made a zig, and changed direction. I sat on the floor to do my part. I couldn’t believe I was allowed to paint a piece of where we lived, and carefully twisted my paintbrush to make my lines dawdle and jump like hers. It wasn’t easy painting on a curve, the paint smelled like gasoline, but it was joy to mark the place where I lived.

We’ve made it ours now, she said proudly as she heaved herself up from the stool.

Surface became everything, surface became my substance. I clung to inanimate objects and gave my allegiance to things. I made secret pacts with my toys; the tiger that served as my teddy bear would always protect me, and I would always protect him. I knew that dolls had souls.

The chauffeur’s timid daughter was no fun to play with, so I wandered alone across parquet floors as wide as beaches, staring up at the gold edges of the high ceilings, rubbing my hands inside the grooves of columns, making friends with the bronze ladies who leaned on either side of the table clock. I pitied the poor caryatids who strained to hold tables on their heads and was comforted by the devotion of flattened urns that had agreed to line up as balustrades.

For my sixth birthday, I received splendid gifts: a doll’s steamer trunk fitted with drawers and hangers bought at Louis Vuitton, and a toy French bulldog. His papier-mâché body was flocked like velvet, a straw ruff erupted around his neck, his paws were set on wooden wheels, and when you pulled his chain, his mouth opened with a rough scrape that could pass for a bark.

There was a party with my school friends in foil crowns throwing paper balls across the Empire table in the Directoire dining room where garlands danced in a frieze up by the ceiling. The pink streamers clung to the chandelier and remained tangled in its branches until the day we left.

You’re spoiled, declared Nana.

The new nanny warned me that if I looked at myself too long in the mirror, I’d see the devil. I kept my eyes firmly on the drain in the sink as I brushed my teeth. She also told me that I, or someone in my family, had killed Jesus Christ. I apologized, though this was the first I’d heard of it.

When I was seven, I found the rule book I’d been waiting for: Les Malheurs de Sophie by the comtesse de Ségur, née Rostopchine, in which undisciplined and willful little Sophie gets into scrape after scrape; she lets her wax doll melt in the sun, tears the legs off bees, steals candied fruit, puts her feet in quicklime, cuts off her eyebrows. Sophie is punished every time. Her guardian angel urges her up a stony path, but Sophie wants to play with pretty boys and girls in beautiful clothes in a garden full of glorious fruits and flowers, and breaks away from the guardian angel to join them. But the beautiful children attack her, the flowers smell foul, the fruits are poison. At last, a chastened Sophie returns to her guardian angel and sets off up the stony path.

Les Malheurs de Sophie was written in 1858 to keep little French girls in line. In it, Sophie’s mother explains that the angel is God warning her that if she continues doing bad, fun things, she will find sorrow instead of joy. The deceitful garden, her mother says, is Hell, but Paradise lies up the steep stony path, which will, however, become easier as she practices being obedient, kind, and good. With that book, the guardian angel moved into my life.

It manifested itself almost at once. At a school friend’s birthday party in a glittering apartment where the ice bucket was a bright red metal apple, the shining chrome table was set with pink glasses, pink paper napkins, and real place cards, and on each plate sat a gift for each guest. I’d never seen party favors before.

I walked around the table examining the different toys on each plate, a tiny bear, a tiny house, a little car, a little purse. I stopped at the little purse. It was electric blue metal, and it closed with a snap. The place card had a girl’s name on it, not mine.

I went hunting for my name, and there it was, JOHN, in very big letters. The French could never get my name right. And in the middle of my plate sat my own party favor, an ugly little yellow toy truck.

I wanted the little blue purse so badly that it made me dizzy. I palmed my ugly yellow truck, moseyed back to the purse, set down the truck, grabbed the purse, and ran to deposit it on my plate, but before I could get there, I fell and cut my chin. Instant punishment for my greed; that guardian angel had wasted no time.

My chin bled onto my new dress, adult arms picked me up with shouts for Mercurochrome and peppermint essence. I fought my way back to the plate where I’d put my yellow truck to return the stolen purse, to undo the punishment I’d just endured. But my chin kept bleeding.

That was the last time I ever stole anything.

My father couldn’t learn French; he was too busy trying to raise money for films to take lessons. He had a louche business partner named Louis who would later turn out to have been a Soviet spy.

I overheard things I didn’t understand. What does ‘financial difficulties’ mean? I asked my aunt Charlotte and uncle Don when they came to visit us. Circumstances became so precarious that my mother had to go to work as an actress to pay the bills, just as she had as a child. She played Charles Boyer’s devoted secretary in a Four Star Playhouse television movie, and hated every minute.

My father’s real ally was my mother’s brother, Don Getz, who distributed movies, lived in Roslyn, Long Island, and traveled constantly between the States and Europe. He arrived with jars of herring that embarrassed my father, who viewed smoked fish as the mark of lower-class Jews.

Don was overweight and easygoing, with curly black hair and a profile like Marlon Brando’s, and he was the only member of the family who never pretended that things were better than they were. I thought of him as a kind of outlaw who’d always speak the truth. He shuffled, sighed Uh boy, found everything funny, and paid no attention to how he looked. My father winced at Don’s khaki pants, his windbreakers, his canary yellow drip-dry shirts, but in 1954 he arranged to distribute Jacques Tati’s Jour de Fête and M. Hulot’s Holiday in America with him. The films had no dialogue and were very funny; they became instant hits. Tati’s daffy Monsieur Hulot had all the charm that Americans impute to the French.

Jacques Tati was always at the grown-up parties at the Palais Rose, sometimes acting the part of a drunk waiter or pretending to be the chauffeur, generally causing wonderful havoc. When Federico Fellini came to dinner and played the golden harp in the Grand Salon as if its strings weren’t broken, Jacques Tati posed with him and made a silly face.

It was Uncle Don who found the former O.S.S. colonel who suggested the TV series that made Jules a producer again after five lost years. The move to London was swift, a drive to the ferry in the May dawn, a bumpy Channel crossing, and a new life. The TV series, titled simply O.S.S., played out on ITV in heroic half hours. Every Friday night at 7:30, a beautiful girl spy would be parachuted into occupied France to fight the Nazis; every week something would go wrong and the star of O.S.S., Ron Randell, would have to parachute into France to rescue her.

Shortly after we arrived in London, Poppy had a heart attack and was taken to Saint George’s Hospital, where he died a few months later. My mother was undone by her father’s death and started analysis. Nana went back to New York, bought an apartment on West 54th Street and a Nash car that she drove very fast across America to visit her sister Annabelle in Los Angeles. A fat lady of fifty-eight in a black dress speeding along Route 66, diamonds and sapphires sparkling, singing along to the radio, a widow at last.

We lived in a small but elaborate mews house on Groom Place that belonged to a captain in the British Navy, whose taste in art ran to large mythological nudes; the living room had dark green wallpaper printed with snowflakes curiously shaped like Stars of David, and many books about the ballet. I found the close dimensions of the mews house comforting, and was excited that my bedroom window faced a solid wall; there could be anything, anything at all, on the other side of those bricks.

If I tried to tell my mother the things I thought I saw at night, or ask her if she believed a guardian angel could punish you, she’d scold, That’s just your imagination running away with you.

I couldn’t read or write English, so I went to the Lycée Français de Londres, an alarming swirl and crash of two thousand nameless pupils. I insisted my father hold up his thumb and mouth the word Reassured when he dropped me off in the mornings. One day he bought me a handful of candy bars. Make friends, he said. It worked. Candy friends, we called them.

He explained that everything was barter, that you needed your stock of wampum to get through. The covered wagon that his grandfather Morris Buck drove west had been full of things to sell or trade, pots and pans, awls, crowbars, guns, cloth, thread. You always need supplies, my father explained, when you’re in new territory.

He saw our family as pioneers conquering the Old World in his pale blue Sunbeam. We’re a unit, he explained. You, your mother, and me. I preferred to think it was just he and I. He woke me up and put me to sleep, and we both had homework. He couldn’t help with mine; I tried to help with his. The first things I read in English were scripts. Why does it always say the man is thirty-five? I asked.

Because the scripts are for Peter, he said, and the star is always thirty-five.

When I met him, I heard Peter’s last name as Autoul, hoped he was French, and pronounced it that way for far longer than was necessary. I was homesick for Paris.

My father’s real project was to film his friend John Brophy’s book The Day They Robbed the Bank of England. While trying to cast the Irish anarchist who tunnels under the bank to steal its gold, my parents had been enthralled by Peter O’Toole in The Long and the Short and the Tall at the Royal Court, and had gone backstage to meet him. It turned out that Peter and his girlfriend, Siân Phillips, lived around the corner from us in the National Coal Board mews, so they came back to Groom Place, stayed up all night drinking, and by morning they’d formed their own movie company, Keep Films, named after the impregnable towers of medieval castles. A keep was strong. A keep was enduring. A keep was never conquered.

Peter was twenty-eight; he’d only been on screen as a bagpiper in a Disney movie and as a Mountie in an Eskimo film that starred Anthony Quinn, but Jules knew that Peter could be the greatest star in the world. I thought he was weird-looking, and still wished he were French. He was the son of a racetrack bookie, and Irish. Peter didn’t want to play the Irish anarchist bank robber Walsh but the upper-class guards captain Monty Fitch, and so he did. In the scene where Monty understands that foul play is afoot, Peter raised his eyes to the quivering flame of a gas lamp with the electric gaze that was to become his hallmark. His hair was still curly black, his nose still bent. The Day They Robbed the Bank of England would change everything.

Given its title, The Day They Robbed the Bank of England required gold to rob; the props department manufactured innumerable gold bars, each the size of a narrow brick. Groom Place soon overflowed with props. Gold bars as paperweights, gold bars under the bar, gold bars in the dining room, gold bars as doorstops. I had four in my room.

Just before Christmas in 1959, when I was eleven, Jules announced we were going to Ireland to stay with my godfather. I didn’t know I had a godfather, I said.

Yes, you do, honey. It’s John.

The way he said it, the name sounded like God.

St. Clerans was on the far side of a long ride along unpaved Irish roads, gray stone behind a round fountain in the night. I got out of the car, dazed from the airplane, nauseous from the long ride, and then I saw Ricki Huston standing next to a pillar, lit by the portico lantern.

She looks like Garbo, my mother whispered, treading carefully on the gravel in her heels. I didn’t know who Garbo was.

Ricki had wide cheekbones and hollows above her eyes. Her dark hair was parted in the middle and hung straight to her shoulders, her shoes were flat and soft and shapeless. I couldn’t tell if she was thin or fat under the bumps and burls of her Irish cardigan, and the set of her mouth didn’t tell me if she was smiling or wary.

Ricki had none of the careful artifice that kept my mother in tight skirts and spiky perfume, in bright, expectant smiles. She wore no makeup. She looked like what I wanted to be, a grown-up with no concession to fashion or the beauty parlor, with the straight back of a ballerina. She looked so complete that she was almost closed off. It took her a while to smile and say hello.

We climbed the steps. A little girl was twined around Ricki’s legs, shy as a toddler. This is Anjelica, said Ricki. She looked very young to me, but before we’d gone through the tall doors, she had the Little Lulu comics from America that I’d persuaded Joyce to buy me at Shannon Airport.

My father carried the box with their gift in it, a massive leather ice bucket from Liberty.

My mother’s heels clicked across the entry hall. How beautiful, she said, pointing at the black marble floor.

It’s Kilkenny marble. Do you see the fossils in it? said Ricki.

My mother made out the outlines of white shells in the black stone, and exclaimed, Clams!

A tall man in a long white dress to his feet stood in the second hallway, bending down toward my father. They clasped.

Jules, good to see you. Joyce, you look beautiful. Hello, Joan. Every word John said had extra syllables in it. His face was a long scoop of new moon, the bridge of his nose flattened from boxing, his eyes hung with pouches. He looked like an orangutan when he smiled.

John Huston was their beacon: part of my father’s war, part of the beginning of his career, part of my parents’ meeting. They were beaming and a little apprehensive; they hadn’t been to St. Clerans before, or to Ireland. Next to John, my father looked small and young, and he laughed nervously.

I’d never seen my father with anyone he worshipped.

It had been years. They didn’t know Ricki, who was John’s fourth wife; Evelyn Keyes, his third, was still Joyce’s best friend.

A Christmas tree hung with tinsel filled the well of the staircase. My father put our box at the base of the tree with the other presents, and we went into the study. Pre-Columbian statues squatted on bookshelves against the teal blue walls. I recognize those from Tarzana, my mother said.

Evelyn got the rest, said John. But you’re right, it’s them.

What’s Tarzana? I asked my mother.

It’s John’s old ranch, where you were conceived, she said.

I went over to touch the statues. There was a dog with a smooth red surface, a squatting man. They knew where I came from, even if I didn’t.

A boy about my age strode in, nervous and energetic, his features as symmetrical as Ricki’s. Tony. He was focused only on his dog, Flash, or on his father.

Gladys, John’s longtime secretary, poured cut-glass tumblers of whisky and ice. I perched on the green corduroy sofa next to my father and looked at a tall wooden snake that rose above the chair where Ricki sat, then at an African statue on the table behind her, a seated woman pulling on her breasts. I’d never seen anything like it outside a museum.

I heard names: Ava, Sam. So sad about Bogie. Betty’s okay now, she’s doing theater again, just opened on Broadway. It’s called Goodbye Charlie. Sydney Chaplin’s in it. Is that so, honey? John asked, drawing out the words. My mother smiled to herself.

They had more drinks and talked about L.A. The bastards were still at it. HUAC. Dalton still in Mexico. Julie, son of a gun, the poor fuck, my father said, tears in his eyes. He was an emotional man.

Who’s she? I asked my mother.

Shhh, she said. It’s a he, John Garfield.

That was talent, said John.

Wait till you meet Peter, said my father. That’s talent. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Is that so? said John. He was leaning over the coffee table, drawing Gladys’s profile. I’d love to meet him.

They’re in Dublin for Christmas, said my mother. Peter and Siân, his girlfriend.

Why don’t you have them come over for a few days? John said.

My father went to make a phone call from the kitchen.

John Huston had brought his world to Ireland, and made it bigger. He’d been my father’s superior in the Signal Corps in the war, captain to his lieutenant in Alaska, major to his captain in Italy. And now he was a lord, drawing at the coffee table in a long white nightshirt, welcoming his lieutenant back to their shared past.

St. Clerans, a Georgian mansion, was a cabinet of curiosities: John’s imagination made real by Ricki’s hard and careful work. On one side of the marble hall was a formal living room with a large Monet of water lilies and an ibis from ancient Egypt. On the other side was a dining room with Japanese brushstroke trees on the wallpaper, and Japanese screens on either side of a dresser where the butler laid out kedgeree. In the second hall a smell of pine and oranges, a bar full of bottles; wafts of cinnamon from the kitchen carried a promise of dessert. The stairs rose past an ancient Greek horse’s head that John said had cost more than the house, to guest rooms that summoned up Napoleon or Louis XVI, Bhutan or Indonesia. John’s bedroom was a green cavern where an Indian goddess held up six arms, and the posts on his bed were sculpted palms that reached the ceiling.

My parents were put in the Grey Room, across the upstairs hall from John. After dinner, I was mortified when Ricki said I’d be staying in the Little House with her and the children.

I followed Ricki, Tony, and Anjelica in the dark down the curving drive, across a bridge, past rustling hedges, through stone gateposts, and onto the thick gravel of a stable yard. The Little House had been the steward’s house in the eighteenth century, and it looked like a child’s drawing of a house, with a window on each side of the door, and three along the upper floor. I didn’t yet know it was the real center of St. Clerans.

Anjelica’s room had wide gray-striped wallpaper and two metal four-posters, Anjelica’s one striped pink, the guest one, once Tony’s, striped blue. A third girl arrived, Marina, the daughter of a woman who bore the unlikely name of Cherokee. She was Anjelica’s age, and set out her Barbie dolls on a mattress on the floor.

Tony and his dog had the room next to Ricki’s.

The next day, after fruitlessly insisting to Anjelica that her name should not be spelled with a j, I retreated downstairs to the kitchen, where I found Ricki baking soda bread. The shoes she wore were odd gray T-straps. Years on point, my feet are distorted, she said. She’d been a real dancer, one of Balanchine’s ballerinas, before she married John.

I was put on point in Paris when I was six, I said. My teacher was Madame Kschessinska.

Mathilde Kschessinska had been a prima ballerina in the Imperial Ballet, mistress to the tsar and two grand dukes; the Russian Revolution stranded her in Paris, Lenin took over her St. Petersburg mansion, and she lost everything. For the next fifty years she’d made it her mission to put little French girls on point before their bones were strong enough to do anything but turn into knotty little clubs.

Kschessinska, said Ricki. "She could do thirty-two fouettés. Show me your feet."

I took off my slippers.

They’ll be like mine, she said, looking at the bunions, but what’s that on your right foot?

That’s my eleventh toe, I said.

The closet in Ricki’s bedroom opened to reveal a space lined in burlap above the drawers. She called it the shrine. Tacked to the burlap were necklaces and ribbons, postcards—Egyptian vases, a Hittite head—pictures, Victorian photographs. She liked things that were discolored, fragile, rare, and strange. A reliquary hung from a necklace of filigreed gold metal rods, her party necklace. Next to it was a chain set with tiny heads—men, women, monsters—that ended in a Maltese cross made up of four rams’ heads, each piece sculpted in lava from Pompeii. The reliquary was oxidized, the gold on the lava necklace dull, the lavas were the colors of earth, brown and mud and yellow, with here and there a gray blue one, a white. It took my breath away. That necklace was everything I wanted the things around me to be. Subtle and mysterious, precious but not gaudy, full of a charge I couldn’t name. I went to look at it even when Ricki wasn’t there.

That Christmas I saw my parents back with their own kind, in their own history. I knew the tense close quarters with Poppy and Nana, the poised diplomatic cheer as they entertained famous people in Paris or, now, in London, the welcome they put on in the living room of the mews house for actors and directors, the siphon shooting soda into whiskies for the actors in O.S.S., or aged colonels who were necessary to secure the right to shoot at Horse Guards Parade, and even more whisky for Peter Autoul, the actor with the sideways nose. I’d seen my father as the man in charge. I’d seen them with my godmother Joan, with Uncle Don, with their newscaster friends from CBS, but I’d never seen them with John. After seven years in Europe, they had come home.

At St. Clerans, my mother didn’t need the smiles that buffered the hotel suites and rented houses in Paris, in Germany, in Austria, in Cannes, and in London, the exclamations of delight that defined each new event as a marvelous moment. She didn’t have to pretend it was wonderful. It was wonderful. For the first two days, she barely exclaimed at all.

On Christmas Eve we sang carols. The house was full now, with more adult guests. Tony, Anjelica, Marina, and I stood on the stairs. Good King Wenceslas looked out, we sang. That would be John. We three Kings of Orient are, we sang, Bearing gifts we travel afar. O Star of wonder, star of might, star of royal beauty bright.

I sang badly, but very loud. I could feel the progress of my camel under me, slowed by the weight of all my gifts.

On Christmas morning, stockings hung at the ends of our beds. I removed tangerines and Brazil nuts wrapped in tinfoil, then a tiny silver box that I pulled open to find a Mexican fire opal, smooth and cool, orange that shaded to shards of impossible blue and green. My birthstone.

I’d been seen and recognized. I’d accept the Little House if it meant I could always have Ricki.

We gathered around the tree that filled the stairwell of the Big House. John’s long wool nightshirt was red that day, for Christmas. John’s secretary, Gladys Hill, and Betty O’Kelly, who looked after the estate and the horses, wore bright wool jackets. We children had new Aran Islands sweaters, and woven Aran sashes wound around our waists. Butler, cook, and maids massed around the backstairs door and darted forward as John called out their names and handed them their gifts. When that was done, the other presents were exchanged.

Jules, Joyce, this is for you, John said, holding out a large flat parcel.

My father came forward, in his new long-sleeved polo shirt, grateful in advance. My mother followed, scarf knotted carefully about her neck, a little tremble in the hand that held her cigarette. They sat on the stairs like children, and carefully pulled the paper open to reveal a drawing by Jacob Epstein, a nude. John had given them art.

She’s called Betty Joel, she was a potter, said John. They may have been lovers. Some time around 1931.

The pencil nude reclined, her eyes huge, her breasts perfect, her pubis barely sketched.

That’s really, really beautiful, John, said Jules, humbled by the gift. Joyce had tears in her eyes and left for the powder room behind the stairs to compose herself.

She’d spent more than they could afford on manufactured goods of excellent quality, but their gift was not art.

Ricki unwrapped the leather-clad ice bucket from Liberty, with the crest of the lion and the unicorn, and turned it toward John, as if faintly puzzled. For the bar, honey, John said.

Anjelica sat on a bench, examining the yellow diamond—a canary diamond it was called—her gift from John. I had an intimation that she’d always get diamonds.

Girls, said John, Marina, Joan, come here, and handed each of us a tin can with a picture of an oyster on its label. Ricki sent us to the kitchen, where the butler opened the tins and prized open the oysters over the sink; inside each one, lying in oyster mucus, was a real, slightly smelly pearl.

I watched John draw compulsively at the coffee table, more interested in his pencil than in what anyone said. I concluded that you put the better part of you into what you made, so that all the things that went through your head could come to life. I looked at him in his long red robe, at Ricki in her bumpy Aran sweater. You could dress up and play a part, become a bigger version of you, welcoming guests with noble condescension,